ABSTRACT
Rights we take for granted today include a maze of political, civil, legal and human rights so complex and deep-rooted that the idea of rights being indispensable to moral and legal discourse seems to be part of the fabric of social life. We have rights in property and rights created by contract. Everyone has the right to a fair trial and access to civil and criminal justice. We have rights as citizens and as consumers. The basic rights to ‘life, liberty and security’ are protected by the European Convention and the 1998 Human Rights Act. At a more mundane level, everyone has the right to voice an opinion and to express dissent. We regularly claim the right to know or the right to reply. Controversy on these matters usually relates to the genuineness of each of these rights, or the extent to which they should be allowed. Nevertheless, in the debates that have raged around the subject of rights in recent years, there is one particular issue that, logically speaking, precedes all the others. This is the question of whether we can meaningfully say that there actually are any rights at all, human or otherwise. While the rights theories of Dworkin, Rawls and Nozick begin from the assumption that there are indeed rights to theorise about, others are more sceptical.
